Manière du départ: Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss take their leave

Claude Imbert's responses to Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss characteristically interpret their work as philosophical departures and emigrations. Less interested in definitively abandoned conceptual models, Imbert focuses on incomplete, 'vexed', 'active' leaving: a text which is 'out of synchronicity with its own philosophical time'; which is 'in advance of oneself '; or uses a philosophical mode whose limitations and fracture points are concurrently revealed. Beauvoir's project in The Second Sex is interpreted as sustained by, and productive in, its own cul-de-sacs, while Merleau-Ponty is interpreted as engaged in an ongoing emigration from phenomenology and transcendentalism. Whereas Derrida's Lévi-Strauss reinstates a Rousseauist vision, Imbert's Lévi-Strauss is a figure perpetually departing from his own resources. In their irony, his reinstatements of nostalgia take leave of themselves. Imbert is described as a critic who has brought her acuity to such philosophical departures.